Every Saturday we round up the best writing about beer from the past week. This time, we’ve got newstalgia, community spaces and hangmen.
First, some stats on community pubs via the Campaign for Real Ale (CAMRA):
Since May’s bulletin, the number of community-owned pubs has increased from 227 to 234. Those not owned but run by the community has seen a slight decrease of two, down to 29, however, one of the losses is now community owned. The number of active campaigns has risen from 90 to 101, so there is clear public interest in community ownership.
This grabbed our attention because we’ve been posting about pub closures quite a bit recently and in a comment on one of those posts Richard Brooks raised them as part of the solution. Despite having written about community pubs at some length in our 2017 book 20th Century Pub we haven’t really felt the influence of the movement in our day-to-day drinking in the way we have noticed, say, micropubs, or taprooms.
For Pellicle new-to-us writer Sophie Prosolek has painted a picture of micropubs and their place in working class former-industrial communities in the East Midlands:
In the East Midlands of the 1980s, beer culture went hand in hand with mining. Back then, the brewing industry in Mansfield, Nottinghamshire, was thriving, and many of the collieries hadn’t yet hit peak production. A pint of mild or bitter was less a curated lifestyle choice, and more a hard-earned punctuation mark at the end of every laborious day, best enjoyed in jam-packed, smoky welfare halls where the air was thick with chatter… But today, in the towns and villages that remain around the former colliery sites, a cultural shift appears to be taking place. Decades after a corporate vacuum swallowed up the social clubs, a number of modern micropubs have opened up. In the process, they’ve revised the working-class third space – much to the surprise of many locals (including my father and me).
Alan McLeod went for a drink at a ‘tav’ (tavern) in Kingston, Ontario, earlier this week, and found it loud, lively and energising:
Me, I grew up in Nova Scotia, that eastern province that is almost entirely encircled by the Atlantic. The common word for public house back there back then was tavern or “tav” for short. Like the old Midtown Tavern in Halifax. Tavern is the same word used by Thomas Raddall in his 1965 portrait of the city Halifax: Warden of the North. The word originally was supposed to indicate a better sort of establishment – with tables and wine… When I moved [to Kingston] in 2003 I was expecting a similar tavern culture but modernity had intervened. There were plenty of drinking spots but instead there were mainly bar restaurants called roadhouses, big screen sports bars, ditto band dance bars, swell cocktail bars and even the first brewpub in Ontario. Not a lot of the same sort of beer pounding taverns that I was familiar with back in Nova Scotia – or even up in the lumber towns of the Ottawa Valley where we had also lived. Places with communal tables, cheap beer, cheap food and a clientel that reached across all strata – college students, military, business folk. Young and old. Tavs.
Steve at Wait Until Next Year has written about a disappointing visit to a pub. He doesn’t name the pub in question which makes his post work almost as a universal review of every so-so pub in the country:
I drank there, periodically at least, years ago. It had closed during Covid and my assumption was that it would never come back. And yet, here it was, recently re-opened. A pub back from the dead is a miracle in this day and age. And I wanted to support the pub, both through buying and pint and through sharing the good news to my tens of readers… And yet. My excitement soon dissipated. The interior had been gutted. Sure, it had been a little old-fashioned rather than “traditional”. It probably needed a bit of a refresh. Maybe there had been a load of damage from it sitting empty for years. But it was still a shame to see the place stripped back to brickwork, the bar re-situated to lurk near the back rather than welcome near the front, the nooks and crannies that gave the place character gone from all the knocking-through that had gone on.
We love (or love to laugh at, or love to hate?) neologisms and Randy Mosher’s latest article for Craft Beer & Brewing has highlighted a couple of great ones. It’s called ‘From “swicy” to “newstalgia”, here are some flavor trends to consider for your next beer’:
Nostalgia, as always, remains a strong driver, but now it must be coupled with a twist – a phenomenon known as ‘newstalgia’… There’s also an overall desire to – as one survey participant said – “make me feel something.” That can manifest in several ways. First is simply big and bold: ‘dirty’ sodas with high syrup ratios, with cream sometimes swirled in, soda-fountain style, along with intense flavors, colors, and textures… Layered, multisensory flavors are popping up in all kinds of foods, drinks, and snacks… Surprise is also a valued experience for people.As far as a layered multisensory experience, beer already delivers, with sweet, bitter, acidic, creamy, and carbonated qualities… Salty, spicy, and savory – dubbed ‘swalty’, ‘swicy’ and ‘swavory’ when balanced with sweetness – will be trickier and need a compelling story to make them work. Cocktails might provide useful inspiration…
At Public House History Donal Fallon has written about Albert Pierrepoint, the last hangman in England, and his connections with both the pub trade and with Ireland. The post is based largely on Pierrepoint’s own 1974 memoir, titled Executioner:
He recalls visiting the Guinness Brewery with his uncle following a hanging in Mountjoy [prison in Dublin], at a time when brewery tours were conducted more informally, and his father had a friend working there: ‘We called at the brewery and my uncle drank a sample or two. I had one glass myself, of some special new porter they were introducing, but I found that it did not agree with me.’… Albert later juggled his career as a hangman with the life of a publican, running the unfortunately named Help The Poor Struggler in Oldham… When the man on the other side of the counter had ended at least 430 lives, people might behave themselves. Still, he discouraged what we might now call ‘dark tourism’. He was known to end the occasional night with a verse of Danny Boy on the piano…
Finally, from BlueSky, a ‘signal’ we’ve pinned…
If the young men I spotted in London these past 24 hours wearing Landlord t-shirts and courage ale caps unironically are anything to go by, we’re going be just fine.
— Matthew Curtis (@totalcurtis.bsky.social) 22 August 2026 at 03:27
For more good reading check out our Patreon-exclusive ‘Footnotes’ to this post and Alan McLeod’s round up from Thursday.
